Alan Rogers was a hero to everyone who knew him

A Soldier’s Legacy
Don’t ask, don’t tell, but Alan Rogers was a hero to everyone who knew him.
by Ben McGrath

In a handwritten letter to himself, dated December 13, 1990, Specialist Alan Rogers, a twenty-three-year-old African-American chaplain’s assistant, grappled with the issue of fear as he prepared for his first combat tour. Aboard Flight 104 from Germany to Saudi Arabia, as part of Operation Desert Shield, he wrote, “It seems like only yesterday that we were initially alerted that our unit would be deploying to the Persian Gulf to support the multinational force buildup already operating in the Middle East theater. Yet, in the midst of all the preparations and briefings, frenzied activity and excitement, there exists a general feeling of numbness. This really isn’t happening . . . this world crisis is not going to affect me. . . .” Rogers was an unusually soft-spoken and cerebral enlistee—he’d been voted “most intellectual” in his high-school class—and he found himself replaying the lyrics to Diana Ross’s “Theme from Mahogany” in his head (“Do you know where you’re going to?”).

Rogers went on to a distinguished military career. After earning two Kuwait Liberation medals with the 8th Battalion, 43rd Air Defense Artillery, which provided Patriot-missile support against Saddam Hussein’s Soviet-made Scuds, he returned home and, on an R.O.T.C. scholarship at the University of Florida, earned his bachelor’s degree, in religion. Then he accepted a commission as an intelligence officer. While stationed in Arizona, as an aide-de-camp at Fort Huachuca, he received a master’s degree in organizational management from the University of Phoenix, and later, after serving two tours in South Korea, and returning to the Middle East in 2002 for the initial phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he pursued a second master’s, in policy management, at Georgetown. The Georgetown stint was part of an élite Defense Department internship program offered to twenty captains across the services, and it included an assignment to the Pentagon—in Rogers’s case, as a special assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon England. After the internship, he worked at the Pentagon as the lead biometrics officer in Army Intelligence—“the stuff that you see on ‘C.S.I.: Miami,’ ” as one of his friends put it, referring to the use of advanced fingerprinting techniques and retinal scans, which are particularly useful in counter-insurgency warfare, and in tracking the sources of improvised explosive devices, the primary killer of U.S. troops. Biometrics was a notorious mess, but Rogers excelled in the role, owing in large part to his facility for reconciling the technological demands of civilian contractors with the Army bureaucracy. “Every biometrics staff in the Pentagon and beyond—every single one, and I’m not joking here—contacted me and asked if they could borrow Major Rogers to help them work out their biometrics problems,” his supervisor later recalled. “Every meeting—fights, pandemonium—heads would turn to Alan.”

The measure of a soldier can fairly be said to consist of his ability to maintain the respect of his peers and his subordinates while earning it anew from his superiors. Rogers rarely talked about himself, which helped contribute to a widespread sense among his troops that he was there “solely for them,” as one Pentagon colleague said recently, but he was also fearless when it came to briefing two- and three-star generals.
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